Ten down, forty-two to go.
The Diviners
by Rick MoodyUsually when writing these things, I've remained careful and kept from giving anything away, but in this case that's impossible, so if you haven't read
The Diviners yet, and plan to, don’t read any further.
I've always enjoyed
Rick Moody's work. In the PoMo tradition, he’s always done well in wrapping his stories up. That is to say, most of his other brethren, and I think you know who they are, delight in telling and developing their stories, but when the time for resolution arrives, they freeze up, throw curveballs, and leave the reader wondering just what happens net. And not in a pleasant "unresolved" manner, but in the manner of misdirection and artifice in an attempt to avoid actually finishing their story. And I'm okay with that, usually, but in this case Moody seem to have veered dangerously into "angry young man" (though he is no longer so young) territory.
The Diviners deals with Hollywood, movies, TV, and pop culture; and these
are all things Moody has become intimately familiar with. And I respect the patina of disdain, and the thinly veiled anger any writer whose work has been adapted by others is sure to be manifest, and that is evident in this most recent work. I can even forgive the foreshadowing, borne from the knowledge of actual history, Moody mines for somewhat comedic effect.
What I can't forgive is that the entire premise of his story is laced with, and decided by, the election of 2000. He taps into his public's own latent anger – and believe me when I say the FOX News / Coulter crowd is NOT reading his books – and utilizes that as an excuse of an ending. He basically takes a wide ranging, superbly engaging story, and undercuts all the characters we grow close to, by blaming absolute failure on the Bush presidency.
I know, what?
From a personal standpoint, here's where I ended up … on the edge of my seat (I admit, I fell for it), waiting to see how a dozen different threads were going to work themselves out, only to have a Supreme Court justice undercut everything in a half-baked epilogue that comes across more as Moody avoiding any further story development in a resolution borne of his own personal anger and dissatisfaction.
To be fair, in the context of Moody’s construct, the ending does
technically work, and allows the reader to extrapolate what fallout will befall the story’s protagonists, as far as the "big picture" is concerned. But ultimately it seems like a cheap out, blaming just about every social and political ill on the decision made in 2000 about who would the next PotUSA.
Personally, I think that almost every political and social ill can be blamed on that decision by seven robed insiders, based on a dispute on a far southern state poking out into an ocean and a gulf, holding an unnatural sway on a moment that would eventually plunge the world into chaos and uncertainty. But Moody overreaches himself, and allows his own internal fury to take over and hijack what was a witty, touching, and supremely human (albeit one with usual tics and tacs specific to modern storytelling) tale.
